You know the background here: after two weeks in New York, we turned south to Virginia to wait on a couple of doctors—which’ll determine where we’re going next—and this change of plans meant we had no camping reservations for the summer. We were in a pickle. When my good friend Mary Margaret offered us her […]
Categories
Two Bands, Four Styles, Several Surprises, One Happy Me
“Is this the The Other One?” I can’t believe I’m about to ask this of a guy who looks to be the dad of the band we’re watching at a park in Upstate New York. The kids in the band are blaring distorted guitar and screaming vocals; they’re metal in every way. There is no […]
Good News on Schodack Island (& More Glen Shots)
I’ll get the good news out of the way and then talk about where we are. The good news is that I do not have a brain tumor. I’m serious, I’ve been wracked with justifiable worry about this, ever since a month ago when my former endocrinologist told me she thought I had one. Since […]
Stormy Inside and Out at Watkins Glen
First, I apologize to any subscribers who got notifications about recent posts that turned out not to be there. I wrote the posts, then thought better about making them public and took them down. More on that at the end here. My excuse is I’ve been waiting for MRI results this long holiday weekend, and […]
Surprising Watkins Glen
I could tell before we pulled into the campground that I was going to hate this place. Tons of out-of-town traffic, signs and parking lots for shuttles, restaurants and gift shops, all for some bunch of waterfalls or something. But Tracy insisted I go on a certain short hike he’d been on years ago. He […]
A Change of Plans
I’ll cut to the chase: We’ve canceled our summer trip to Newfoundland, which is a really big deal for us. Weeks of planning, a lot of money in reservations, where we’re going to live for three months—all have been scrapped in one afternoon. It wasn’t an easy decision, and we took more than a week […]
An Odd Bliss
There are a few moments in my travel life that really feel right, whatever that means, despite all kinds of weirdness that goes along with them. A moment like this happened a few days ago, when we were driving down a one-lane dirt road in the middle of nowhere, with no cell signal and no […]
F&F ‘24 Ends with Gratitude in Maryland
That’s the Friends and Family Tour 2024, for any uninitiated readers out there. I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants this week, in another hometown of sorts, near Frederick, Maryland, where I worked for ten years. Spending precious time with old friends, fitting in PT appointments, scrambling to take notes during important calls […]
The Absolute Freaking Weirdness of this Lifestyle
This hometown week on the Friends and Family Tour ‘24 has been a honking-big, tangled-up knot of red-hot emotions. It’s not just been about seeing people I haven’t seen in years. It’s been about being struck by aging (and in a flash of recognition that really should be hidden). It’s been about cramming what we’ve […]
Three Days at the Center of the Universe
Years ago when Tracy and I were drinking beer at Center of the Universe Brewing just a little north of Richmond, I looked over at the RV park across the street and thought, “Wouldn’t that be cool to stay there!” And, here we are, not really by choice, but it was where we could get […]
